Q: What can I do about excess copper in my soil?
A: First of all, since you’re at this conference [the 2023 Acres U.S.A. Eco-Ag Conference], I’m optimistic that you’re not continuing to use copper as a bacterial control. The reality is that it’s relatively easy to manage many of these airborne diseases without intensive copper applications.
But once you have copper in your soil profile at greater than 30 parts per million, there’s only one treatment I know of that can offer the microbial community a reprieve: humic substances — leonardite, or some type of complex humic substance that hasn’t been degraded. Some types of compost can also accomplish this, but they’re rare.
What do these humic materials do? Well, they do about a million things. You can call them chelation agents, but the effect they’re having is more fundamental than chelation. Chelation is the mechanism, but what humic substances do really well is to provide a very powerful homeostasis buffer. Homeostasis is a function of maintaining balance — something that enables self-regulation up and down. Our bodies maintaining a temperature of 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit is a function of homeostasis — homeostatic balance.
Soil biology and humic substances provide nutrients to plants with homeostatic functioning. They prevent plants from absorbing excesses. Also, there are many soils that have tiny trace amounts of certain essential nutrients — they might contain cobalt, for example, at a tenth of a part per million, and cobalt levels for optimal crop performance are going to be somewhere in the neighborhood of one to three parts per million — and yet the crop can have adequate cobalt in that environment, as long as you have good homeostasis functioning.
The principle here is that biology supersedes chemistry. If you have highly functional, active, vigorous biology, it can overcome chemistry imbalances in the soil. And that is a function of homeostasis. I’ve never seen the reverse to be true — that you could have perfectly balanced chemistry, but dysfunctional biology, and expect to have a healthy, well-performing crop.
